


Forget The Horror (If You Can)

by squanderbird



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Gen, Reichenbach Survivor Feels, Reichenbach reaction fic, Spoilers, angstfest!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 15:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squanderbird/pseuds/squanderbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Tuesday, all the force know. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Requested on the Week 70 Make Me a Monday post of the LJ sherlockbbc community by destinydefied. A series of small, Donovan-centric vignettes, post Reichenbach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget The Horror (If You Can)

i.

By Tuesday, all the force know. Sally can feel them, pinprick irises and the firm indent of disapproving lips, gossip pecking at her flesh crow-like. Her heels are loud as they click, click down the corridor, pressing tiny, indiscernable marks into the ugly regulation-standard carpet. Her heart thuds inside the crisp blouse, each beat an execution.   
There's a brief, heady silence when she enters the main office - a pause eerily like the intake of breath before a gunshot, before the first toppling of a fall. And then it happens. One by one, each officer turns from her, a shuttering of creased suited backs slamming down like charges in a court, guilty, guilty, guilty. 

They are her jury, and she has no defence. 

She tries to hold her head high, condemned to drown in silence, electrocuted with damning. But it's difficult to even walk when there's a dead man clinging to your back and grimly, stubbornly refusing to let go.

ii. 

She dreams of him, sometimes, of those sickening razorblade eyes peering over an upturned coat collar, long violinist's fingers grasping like insects at some bit of evidence, the triumphant, needling smirk of superiority. Of his face when the arrest warrant came, eyeing her with the calm of one who had predicted all of this, every detail, of the stolen gun and chink of handcuffs, his expression abruptly metamorphosing into something bloody and waxen. She'd forced herself to view the official coroner's photographs, him still as an ivory idol, carved and contorted. 

Sometimes, she dreams of him falling, falling, though she never saw it and never had to, suspended in the last few lungfuls of life, the freak who was never ever a fraud, Lucifer genius tumbling pell-mell to unyielding pavement. He never lands before she fights awake, delirious with unease, but that's probably better, really. 

iii.

The truth comes out, inevitable as the sea yielding its dead, belched from mocking salty jaws. John's persistent Internet campaign reveals witnesses, hundreds of them, who stand in front of a press mob at the shell of 221B Baker Street, swearing on oath ingenious, brilliant Sherlock was no fake. They materialise, the denizens of case studies solidified, children and bankers, scientists and celebrities. Henry Knight takes the train down, and the debate is picked up by several prominent national newspapers whose reporters eagerly probe and query. They're not him, but this time, they don't have to be. Richard Brooke falls apart like paint flakes, crumbling like a papery snakeskin, ephemeral and substantial as tabloid lies. Sherlock’s Homeless Network remain tight-lipped anonymous, so the final coffin nail is driven by the kidnapped girl, whose screams break into words that trip uncertainly, vindication beneath the photography flashes. Moriarty left enough breadcrumbs, holes in his false records, for them to find and pick apart.

“He wanted us,” Lestrade says, “To find out all along. After. Now.” 

A triple death by Brighton pier, with a mocking message scrawled bloody across concrete and rivets. They cannot solve it without him, so they don’t solve it at all.

Sherlock is recast in the basting of media attention as positively Byronic, the doomed detective driven to a lonely end atop a London hospital. Fans mourn publicly, leaving wilting chemical-scented bouquets, stacked up rotting on the pavement. He would have sneered at them, the drooping camellias and social networking sites with their tribute pages. Donovan is the silent, unspoken Delilah who made the temples fall, and so says nothing on the topic. 

The Yard refuse to make a statement. John, however, does, and it is brave and honest and unflinching, it is repeated on loop on every mainstream news channel. It resounds in Sally's head, a choked requiem for the reptile-eyed man who has joined the ranks of angels, too bad and disjointed and human for this world to abide. 

iv.

She's walking out of the psychiatrist's office when she sees John Watson, sat greying-out on the beige waiting sofa. She's frozen, face pale and burning all together, watching John's drained eyes recognise her, every nuance of him turned down onto mute. He stands heavily, tiredly moving like a sleepwalker for whom the nights chug past slow and restless, old when he shouldn’t be for years yet. 

"John," she gabbles, stumbling forward, composure abandoned, "John, I'm so --"

He looks through her as though through a shadow or unpleasant stranger, doesn't speak or smile or joke the way he used to, the way he ought. He brushes past her, and walks into the office, his silence curdling in her bones. 

v. 

Lestrade makes for his phone on automatic, then stops himself. The lingering silence is smothering and insidious as slow-death mercury. Sally walks out of the murder scene building, ducks past the crowds, keeps walking, walking, until the crime scene tape's warning is only a distant flicker, tucked faraway behind her eyelids.

Dead men don't forgive, but she can't help wanting to try.


End file.
